Picture the quintessential English countryside. What does your mind’s eye conjure? Is it the twee lanes and dense, camera-ready Cotswold stone villages of Gloucestershire? Or perhaps the dramatic cliffs of Cornwall, out at the far westernmost edge of the country? Or maybe it’s Dorset, Devon or the North Yorkshire Moors. Any one of them would make sense because all are counties familiar from canons of literature, film and television – the words and images that have elaborated for us our ideas about Great British Country, that most fetishised lifestyle.

And then there is North Norfolk. Very likely less familiar to you but, for the English, every bit as quintessential – and as alluring, albeit differently so. You reach it via a two-and-a-half hour drive (or train ride) from London, bearing north-east through Essex and traversing the soothing, Constable-esque low hills and dales of Suffolk, before the A134 opens back out into a long stretch through a sprawling and flat countryside – a landscape “untroubled by contours”, as a colleague once wrote. It’s a corner of England rich in beauty and history; one that’s both agrarian and ancient, alternating tilled fields and old-grown forests of alder and ash, elm and oak.